Nefertiti is the ritualized Western personality, a simplified object.
She is unreachably pure.
Her eyebrows have been shaved and then redrawn with the width and depth of male eyebrows.
She is cleansed of every hair, like a priest.
She has the face of a mannequin — static, posing, self-offering.
Her knowledge is both unnatural and hieratic.
Modern window or catwalk mannequins are androgynous, because their femininity is abstracted through a masculine gaze.
If the bust of Nefertiti was a studio model, then it is both a mannequin and a royal model, like a London tailor's prototype.
As queen and mannequin, Nefertiti is simultaneously exposed and enclosed, face and mask.
She is naked, but also armored; experienced, but ritually pure.
She is sexually unavailable because she is disembodied: her body does not exist.
Her full lips invite you, but remain tightly closed.
Her perfection exists to be displayed, not to be used.
Akhenaten and his queen greeted the court from a balcony — the "show window."
All art is a window display.
Nefertiti's face is like the sun of knowledge rising on a new horizon — in the framework, or mathematical grid, of man's victory over nature.
The idolatrous objectivity of Western art is a theft of the authority of Mother Nature.**
By Camille Paglia
